Anti-Spam Company Files Lawsuit to Claim Spam Damages

An anti-spam technology company based in Utah filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria on April 26, 2007 to find out the people responsible for "spambots". Spambots are software that hunt for e-mail addresses on the Internet to sell them to spammers.

The lawsuit is of the highest order that demands $1 billion in damages caused to members of Project Honey Pot in almost 100 countries. Project Honey Pot is a distributed system to identify spam. Unspam runs it that digs into decoy e-mail ids to collect spam data referred to as 'honey pots' and then uses the information to identify spam.

Project Honey Pot is a global activity to thwart spam. In this, thousands of web users in more than 100 countries placed codes on their websites to help track spammers and their messages.

Attorney Jon Praed is the Unspam representative. He is one of the founders of Internet Law Group and has been representative of Verizon and AOL in lawsuits that were filed against hardcore spammers in the past.

According to Praed, the complaint considers all the spam that came to Project Honey Pot. InformationWeek published Praed's statement on April 27, 2007. Project Honey Pot received 6.1 million spam mails during January 2005 to April 2006, according to the court filing in Virginia that sums up the total spam servers in Virginia to 20,000.

Praed said they wouldn't be able to know the number of people responsible. But when the spammers have been identified they expect the number of defendants to be surprisingly small.

Praed admitted that to prevent overseas spammers might be a difficult task. One should be realistic of the capability of doing that, he said. However, anyone being outside the U.S. borders doesn't make him free from responsibility.

Project Honey Pot is the most recent initiative to counter Internet spam. Earlier in 2004, a judge from Maryland declared the state's 2002 Commercial Electronic Mail Act as unconstitutional. It was the earliest state law to sentence spammers. Again in 2004, a number of major Internet companies filed lawsuits against spam under the 2003 federal CAN-SPAM Act.